For the last 25 years, I have looked very closely at the adoption cycle of products and I have learned something very important. Seldom does a product, especially a hardware product, find favor quickly with the broad consumer market. Video recording devices were refined and used in professional markets for over a decade before VCRs made it into the living rooms of consumers. PCs spent well over a decade in offices before they became cheap enough for the home and made sense for consumers. I could detail dozens of other examples but the bottom line is most technology gets started and refined in what we call vertical markets well before they get perfected and priced low enough for consumers.

When Google introduced their Google Glass, this was the first thing that came to mind about this project. I wondered if Google even had a clue how tech adoption cycles develop. While it is true glasses had been used in vertical markets since 1998, even after all of this time, we saw no interest by consumers. Google’s decision to aim Glass at consumers first, yet price them as if they were going to vertical markets, stumped me. Even the folks who had spent decades making specialized glasses for use in manufacturing, government applications, and transportation were dumfounded by Google’s consumer focus with Google Glass, priced at $1500.